The Clarence Thomas confirmation vote provided an opportunity to demonstrate hindsight bias in a repeated-measures design using an ongoing political event. The 57 subjects displayed statistically significant memory distortions in recalling a higher number of confirming senatorial votes when asked one month after the vote to recall the estimate they had provided the day before the vote.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
DaviesM. F. (1987) Reduction of hindsight bias by restoration of foresight perspective: Effectiveness of foresight-encoding and hindsight-retrieval strategies. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 40, 50–68.
2.
FischhoffB. (1975) Hindsight = foresight: The effect of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1, 288–299.
3.
FischhoffB.BeythR. (1977) “I knew it would happen”—remembered probabilities of once-future things. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 13, 1–16.
4.
HawkinsS. A.HastieR. (1990) Hindsight: Biased judgements of past events after the outcomes are known. Psychological Bulletin, 107, 311–327.
5.
HochS. J.LoewensteinG. F. (1989) Outcome feedback: Hindsight and information. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 15, 605–619.
6.
SynodinosN. E. (1986) Hindsight distortion: “I-knew-it-all-along and I was sure about it.”Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 16, 107–117.
